Full Title: Transatlantic Airline Fuel Efficiency Ranking, 2014
Author(s): Irene Kwan and Daniel Rutherford
Publisher(s): International Council on Clean Transporation (ICCT)
Publication Date: November 1, 2015
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Surprisingly little public information is available about the fuel efficiency, and therefore carbon intensity, of international flights. This report summarizes the first public, transparent assessment of the fuel efficiency of the top 20 airlines operating nonstop transatlantic passenger flights linking Europe to the U.S. and Canada. This study combines the highest quality publicly available and commercial operations data with sophisticated aircraft fuel burn modeling to benchmark the fuel efficiency of carriers on a passenger kilometer basis. The study explains the fuel efficiencies of individual carriers and highlights the most important drivers of efficiency in the aggregate.
Figure ES-1 illustrates the fuel efficiency of the 20 carriers analyzed. Norwegian Air Shuttle, the world’s seventh largest low-cost airline, was the most fuel-efficient airline on transatlantic routes, on average providing 40 passenger kilometers per liter (pax-km/L) of fuel on its predominately Boeing 787-8 fleet. Airberlin, Germany’s second largest airline, came in second with a fuel efficiency of 35 pax-km/L, though burning 14% more fuel per passenger kilometer than Norwegian, followed by Aer LIngus, the national flag carrier airline of Ireland, with a fuel efficiency of 34 pax-km/L. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Air Canada, Aeroflot Russian Airlines, Turkish Airlines, and Air France were tied for fourth place with an average fuel efficiency of 33 pax-km/L. Delta Air Lines, which had the largest transatlantic market share of any carrier, and Icelandair, which operates an old fleet of Boeing 757 aircraft from its hub in Reykjavik, both provided the industry average fuel efficiency of 32 pax-km/L (indicated by the dotted blue vertical line).